Mel grinned at Kelly. “See — isn’t he great?!” she gushed excitedly. “I know you don’t like the idea of dating anyone who’s not your destined, but didn’t I tell you Benji is just adorable? You two would be just the perfect couple! Don’t you just want to give him a _chance, _now that you’ve met him, Kells?”
Kelly remained silent, her eyes blankly glued to the calandar behind Mel’s head.
Mel’s grin diminished slightly. “…Is something wrong?”
About time you noticed, said Kelly’s internal voice, cuttingly sardonic as always despite her numb inner turmoil.
“Benji is my true love,” Kelly whispered.
Mel squealed. “Oh, of _course _he is — shouldn’t I have guessed that!” She paused, and then leaned forward, voice conspiratorially hushed. “So what’s you power, Kells?”
Kelly didn’t answer.
Mel frowned. “…Is the power bad?”
—
Kelly looked around with wide eyes, taking in everyone’s frozen features. For a moment, nothing at all moved.
Then, she watched as the world swirled into motion. The people remained frozen, but their shadows lengthened and twisted and came up to stand on the ground themselves, with long strips of darkness still connecting them to their casters. They moved, humanlike but unnatural, constructing scenes out of the contrast of dark and light.
Kelly had eyes only for her true love. Curious but with an odd sinking feeling in her gut, she watched as Benji’s shadow stretched out across the ground towards her. She turned as it continued past her, then stood up from the ground, tall against the horizon. She watched as it portrayed a terrible scene: shadow Benji walked exaggeratedly across a shadow road, before a shadow car twisted into existence from the length of inky darkness and headed straight towards him. The moment of collision was defined by an animated mess of random seeming black lines — it was hard to make out anything specific within it, but it didn’t matter. It was obvious what happened.
The mess of black expanded until there seemed to be nothing else, before it parted again, just slightly, to form something written in the gaps of the shadow: 12 20 24.
She spun back around, and saw all of the other shadows, each finishing up gory journeys of their own, similar number sequences of their own being scratched into walls of darkness.
With horror, she realized what they were: they were dates.
—
When life resumed, Kelly could do nothing but stare.
Benji’s hands were covering his mouth, eyes wide and slightly teary.
“…You have no idea how long I’ve waited for this moment,” he said.
The words tumbled weightlessly through Kelly’s numb lips almost without her permission; she felt far away as she responded: “You’ve waited nearly your entire life.”
Buzzing and biting Begging to be let out Boiling and scratching Under my skin No matter what I do The door stays firmly shut.
I snarl, behind a smooth and calm facade. I growl, as my words come out sweet and diplomatic. I smile, but behind my eyes, A million ways to ruin your life fly past. You’re lucky for my discipline, You’re lucky for my kindness, Because everytime you wrong me- Everytime you fuck me over- it’s
Buzzing and biting Begging to be let out. Boiling and scratching Under my skin. No matter what I do The door stays firmly shut.
I don’t think you appreciate The amount of restraint it takes To be this good. You don’t know that You’re poking at a monster.
But its claws are clipped so short they bleed: Leashed and muzzled, perhaps no worry’s needed…
Buzzing and biting Begging to be let out Boiling and scratching Under my skin No matter what I do The door stays firmly shut. Lucky for the world, but…
Scratch marks on my skin: If my nails were longer There’d be blood. Bitemarks on my hands: If you pushed me further I’d pierce flesh.
How long will I last?
I wrote this pretty quickly, and a lot of the words in this were new to me (I overused Google big time). If you see any mistakes or notice anything that can be improved, definitely let me know!
—
“I possess a substantial capacity for English in both its recorded and verbalized configurations,“ I said confidently.
Erik Franklin blinked and stared at me for a long moment, before he scribbled something on his notepad.
That didn’t bode well.
“I didn’t get the job,” I said, collapsing backwards onto the couch with a sigh.
Claire doesn’t even bother to look up from the notebook she was writing in. How rude. “That’s what happens when you talk the way you do.”
“It was a formal interview!” I protested. “I spoke in a formal manner, as was fitting in that situation.”
“You can talk casually in a job interview, Max,” she said, glancing up at me over her glasses. “You already speak fancier than the average person. You really don’t need to be complicating it any more.”
“How is it a blunder to demonstrate to an employer that I have an excellent vocabulary?”
“It shows that you have bad word choice,” she said. “It makes it seem like you’re unable to show restraint, and it reflects poorly on your judgement.”
I gaped at her. “Excuse me — I have excellent word choice! My words are always advanced, my sentences are /always/ grammatically correct, and I know for a fact that I always use my words in a context that fits with their respective definitions.”
“That’s not what I…” Claire shut her mouth and looked away. I waited patiently for what she had to say; while she was almost certainly wrong in this instance, I do value her opinion. “It comes across the same way it does when a student pads their essays with excessively wordy phrases and unnecessarily complicated words,” she said at last.
I blinked at her. “What do you mean?”
“I mean the way some students use long or obscure words to make their essays seem impressive to teachers,” she rephrased.
“I don’t see how that’s a bad thing. I always showcased my vocabulary in my essays,” I said.
Claire stared at me for a moment before sighing. “Of course you did,” she muttered. “And how did the teachers like that?”
I crossed my arms and lifting up my chin stubbornly. “My English teachers were all incompetent,” I informed her. “They don’t understand good literature. And neither did Erik Franklin! It’s not /my/ fault he’s too stupid to understand, and clearly that work was below me, if he’s an accurate representation of who they would be looking for. I wouldn’t want to work somewhere that would entertain mediocrity like that anyway.”
Claire was shaking her head at this point. When I finished my rant, she said, “It’s not about intelligence. It’s about your ability to communicate effectively with others. If you constantly use big words, you overcomplicate communication and increase the likelihood that you will use words which those around you don’t know, thereby risking otherwise unnecessary misunderstanding and raising the amount of time and effort people have to spend figuring out what you’re trying to say.”
I stared at her for a long moment, before I slowly shook my head. She exhaled heavily, the sound filled to the brim with frustration, and she put down her pen.
“I’ll try to say this in a language you might understand,” she said, looking me directly in the eyes. “Your potentiality for accomplishment is significantly encumbered by your ineptitude for temperance and your unequivocal deficiency in even an adequate magnitude of perspicacity.”
My eyebrows rose and my eyes widened. Something nagged at my mind and I felt like I should probably try to figure out her point, but something else had taken over my focus.
Impressed, I said, “Perspicacity is a good word. What’s it mean?”
I never was an early riser. As the birds catch the worms, I’m still caught in my slumber.
The sun rises, heating the air. As I sleep, the ice melts: Everyone else gets quite a scare.
Loud sounds echo. The sounds of war. As screams ring out, I only snore.
I wake up and the world is gone. I never saw the changes on the horizon.
I never was an early riser.
He asked her why she was leaving And for a moment she was disbelieving; He spoke as if he’d thought about it and came up empty But in reality, he’d provided her with plenty.
Then she reminded herself about what she’d realized Just what about him she’d recognized:
Over the past few weeks, while he was away, She realized he was never going to stay. He would keep on leaving her without a trace And then return, expecting her to accept him with patience and grace
She realized that no matter what he tried to say, he didn’t really intend to change And she realized that the idea of living like this was beginning to seem a little bit strange
If there’s one thing she now knows, It’s that there’s nothing she owes She’s required to give to him Neither time nor explanation To this man who’s treated her so badly Even if he now looked at her so sadly
So she shrugged and turned with a smile For the truth had been there all the while.
——
Not too happy with this one, but at least I wrote something!
It doesn’t end with the line, because it got away from me and I couldn’t make it work. It was heavily inspired by it though so I’m posting it under the prompt anyway.
Anyway, this isn’t my best work, but better to post something than nothing! Here it is
———
Nancy grinned sharply as she looked at the crowd in front of her.
They were joking and messing around with their neighbors. Once upon a time, Nancy would have seen that as their weakness - they didn’t take things seriously enough, she thought - but now she looked at them, with the dirt on their faces, the armor on their bodies, and the weapons in their hands, and she knew they were ready to fight.
Their numbers may be much smaller, but each and every one of them was worth at least a hundred of their enemy, no matter how light-hearted and playful they seemed now. Nancy couldn’t be more proud; she’d trained them well.
Only because of her superior senses did she hear the nearly the sound of crunching leaves in the distance so early.
She shouted a command, and the crowd in front of her was silent and standing in neat, orderly rows within mere seconds, awaiting her next orders.
A few moments, and everyone else could hear it - and everyone else could feel it - the approach of the enemy.
Nancy looked at the faces of her army. The faces ranged from smiling, excited ones to pale, frightened ones, but they all had one thing in common: a look of steely determination.
She knew all of her soldiers would fight to the death for their village; for their legacy; for their cause.
——————
And fight to the death they did.
Each fighter on her side was worth a hundred of the enemy, but that didn’t mean much when they only numbered around three hundred, and they were faced with many tens of thousands.
They’d known from the start it would be a losing battle. Nancy sighed as her soldiers began to fall one by one; they were each surrounded by the bodies of their enemies, but each one that fell was replaced by another. There was no ground to be made when faced with that overwhelming sea.
And soon she was the only one standing. She looked at her allies, who lay bleeding, dead, and dying on the ground, and at the enemy, who were exploring their newly conquered lands.
Nancy sighed, wishing, as she always did in the aftermath, that she could have had any other job. But she was the angel sent to train - but never to fight amongst - the Lost Causes for their Battles That Couldn’t be Won. She gave them the glory they wanted in death, but glory wouldn’t raise the dead.
She looked at the bodies littering the battlefield, and she shook her head with a small, self-deprecating smile at the thought of her own foolishness - because for a moment, despite herself, she’d dared to hope.
She sighed, turned her back, and left the shadows of yet another war behind.
No one had ever managed such a feat before. Never before had there been a person like him.
Not that he seemed particularly extraordinary. Neither his name nor his appearance seemed anything other than generic, average, mediocre - if he was special, it was only in how completely, utterly, /plainly/ ordinary he was in every way.
Nobody expected it, and perhaps that’s why it happened how it did. No one intuitively expects for extraordinary things to have ends that are anything other than extraordinary themselves; so perhaps it was fitting that something so great as this would be fated to have the only truly unexpected ending.
No other finale would have made so much sense.
Nobody other than Jim Smith could have ended life on Earth.
